Are you, like most New York City residents a renter? Consider spending some time with other tenants this Tuesday. Advocates for actually affordable housing will meet Tuesday, June 26, 2007 at 5PM at the Great Hall of The Cooper Union. 7 East 7th Street at the corner of 3rd Ave. After the press event, you can join other tenants at a Punch & Judy show, the Rent Guildlines Board's final meeting where Mr. Bloomberg's appointees decide how much more rent you should pay. ( To register to speak at the public hearing, call the RGB at 212-385-2934.)

Take the 6 train to Astor Pl., or the R,W to 8th Street
or M1, M15, M6, M101, or M102 buses to Astor Place or Cooper Square

From Tenants & Neighbors:

There will be a press conference to present Mayor Bloomberg's HOUSING REPORT CARD. This event will take place at the final vote of the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, where this year's rent increases will be determined for one million rent stabilized households.

Although the Mayor will receive a few good grades for his
commitments to build some new affordable housing, he will clearly fail when it comes to his appointment of landlord-leaning public members to the Rent Guidelines Board, thus resulting in excessive rent hikes for
1 million New Yorkers.

He will also receive very poor scores for his failure to push for stronger protections for current and former Mitchell-Lama tenants, his opposition to Local Law 79 (tenant right of first refusal), his opposition to Home Rule over NYC's rent and eviction laws and much much more.

Sue Susman, a Mitchell-Lama tenant organizer adds that under Mr. Bloomberg misleadership "17,000 Mitchell-Lama units have been lost with only 4,000 preserved." (Sue Susman says the expert who is the source of these figures is Tom Waters of the Community Service Society)In fuller, but not complete context, Waters was assessing a Bloomberg program to provide refinancing for Mitchell-Lama projects. "It's a good thing as far as it goes but the incentives are evidently not strong enough for most ML rental buildings. The contrast between 17,000 units lost in Bloomie's term and less than 4,000 preserved is all the commentary I think anyone needs."

In addition, Mr. Bloomberg has cut real estate taxes for owners while at the same time starving NYC's own public housing. In an era of multi-billion-dollars surpluses, the Mayor has been forcing hundreds of millions of dollars in cuts to the NYCHA budget. He has also taken the view that people with disabilities should be severely limited in their access rent subsidies. During Bloomberg time, $527 Million were cut from NYCHA, and in the budget cycle just started NYCHA plans misuse $150 Million in capital budget for maintenance, and reduce employee costs (and their services to tenants) by $40 Million. In NYC budget terms these are small numbers, but their impact will be devastating and will still leave NYCHA $51 million in the hole. (See the NYCHA budget press release here )

If you missed the May 23rd Rally and March at Stuyvesant Town (as did I) you may want to check out the photos of it here. or for 198 more photos (wow! that's a lot!) click here.

While we're giving Mayor Bloomberg a report card, we might consider a report card for the legislature which, in my view has been deplorably inert. The big advance has been the adoption of the Quinn-Bloomberg deal on 421(a) real estate tax abatement in exchange for 80/20 "affordable housing." The deal to further subsidize the Atlantic Yards project is only one of the more disappointing parts of this legislation. Another is that, as a special treat for the NY Real Estate Board, the expanded "exclusion zone" (in which the 80/20 formula is required to get the exemption) does not go into effect for six months. As a result, projects in the pipeline can shed any affordable housing and still get exemption. (To be fair, for a change, the Lopez legislation also improves the deal somewhat for lower income New Yorkers: His bill added new neighborhoods where developers
must build affordable housing to qualify for the break, including some, like Crown Heights, that have not been reached by gentrification.His bill would require the subsidized apartments to be made available to families at a lower income level than is currently specified by the
law..." (NY Times' Danny Hakim)

So many urgent bits of legislation were stalled that many of us have become convinced that a tenant agenda cannot be passed in Albany unless and until GOP's control of the State Senate is ended. In the words of Sue Susman:

My take on what it all means: We HAVE to elect a Democratic majority state senate if we want to see any bills passed that could genuinely preserve and create affordable housing. Given that even Democrats may be subject to "persuasion" by the real estate lobby, even their election is not a cure-all, and tenant activism is crucial.

Should we also consider giving report cards to tenant advocates? What could they (we) have done to end up with better outcomes? Obviously, not everything is different since day one. How could we have leveraged the political strength tenants have into better outcomes?

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | |